Opera

‘Besides feeble writing, there is a mixture of tragic-comedy and buffoonery in it, which Apostolo Zeno and Metastasio had banished from serious opera’. You can always rely on Charles Burney (the celebrated musicologist, who spent most of the 18th century being professionally underwhelmed) to find fault. But writing here about Handel’s Xerxes he has a point. The opera’s blend of lighter and more serious elements, though typical of Venetian opera, was by no means the norm for the Londoners who were its audience. They didn’t like it then, and nearly 300 years later it’s something we still seem to struggle with, as English Touring Opera’s latest season makes unexpectedly clear.

Shiny swags of gold cloth hang in front of the curtain before David McVicar’s production of Der Rosenkavalier, and that’s good. You want a touch of luxury in a Rosenkavalier. This is 20th-century opera’s great sinful, indulgent treat. Think of it and you think of Karajan and Schwarzkopf: huge creamy voices, silken Viennese strings, and New York Met production budgets. In truth, when Der Rosenkavalier gets under your skin, none of that matters. It’s not the glittering set pieces that turn out to be the real heart of the thing; not even the final Trio or the justly famous sequences in which the Marschallin ponders the transience of youth.

Richard Jones’s new production of Don Giovanni at ENO bears some passing resemblances to the opera as envisaged by its librettist and composer. Mainly, however, it goes its own way, refusing most of the time, especially at key moments, to listen to the music Mozart wrote, with consequences that Jones no doubt regards as ‘creative infidelity’. When we enter the auditorium we see a contemporary streetlight and a phone booth, straight out of Jones’s production of Siegfried at the Royal Opera 20 years ago. The curtain rises on a huge ‘Wanted’ poster of Christopher Purves, followed by a depressing series of bleak rooms, in one of which the Commendatore is bedding a prostitute and wearing white boxers, signifiers of nudity at ENO.

The subtitle for Mozart’s Così fan tutte may be ‘The School For Lovers’, but it’s as a school for directors that the opera is most instructive. From four lovers and two different romantic pairings, the composer spins a parable whose moral is as elusive as its morals. Faced with so much ambiguity (and so little political correctness) directors tend either to sand down the rough edges with laughs, or fling a capacious concept over the whole lot. It says something about the awkward profundity of this most inscrutable and affection-resistant of the Mozart-Da Ponte collaborations that it can take it. It says even more that you so rarely see an outstanding production.

Alas, poor André Tchaikowsky. A survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, with an assumed name that probably did his musical career as much harm as good (he was born Robert Andrzej Krauthammer), he died of cancer in 1982 shortly after his only opera, The Merchant of Venice, was rejected by ENO. He’s remembered today principally for bequeathing his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use as a prop, in which capacity he starred alongside David Tennant in Hamlet in 2008. That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once.

They say that the devil gets all the best tunes, and on the basis of this week’s opera-going it would be hard to disagree. Performances by Cape Town Opera and Opera Rara turned their attention on two historical icons: South Africa’s anti-apartheid campaigner and president Nelson Mandela, and ancient Assyria’s murderous and would-be incestuous queen regent Semiramis. No prizes for guessing who came out on top. When it comes to art, evil takes it nearly every time. Who wouldn’t choose The Rake’s Progress over The Pilgrim’s Progress, Don Giovanni over Don Ottavio, sex over sanctity? For a good man, Nelson Mandela has inspired a lot of really, really bad art.

Mozart & Salieri Grimeborn, Arcola Theatre, until 13 August I have been a fairly conscientious reviewer of Dalston's Grimeborn festival for the last eight years. The name is less suitable now than it was. The Arcola Theatre, where the operas are performed, is now only a stone's throw from Dalston Square, with its chic apartment blocks and bars and the resplendent C.L.R. James library, and the whole neighbourhood is upwardly mobile. The Arcola itself remains a ramshackle place, and you can expect the usual late start, inadequate provision of programmes, and general air of administrative amateurism. This year's season began on 23 July, and runs till 8 September.

Die Fledermaus Opera Holland Park, until 5 August Johann Strauss's opera Die Fledermaus is a masterpiece that I have had a lifelong passion for, a passion which productions, whether in England or abroad, are obstinately determined should remain unrequited. I hadn't seen it, until Opera Holland Park's new production, since the 2003 production at Glyndebourne, which almost killed my passion, with its endless laborious prosiness. All the great operas and operettas with spoken dialogue have the same problem, how to keep the interest going when everyone is waiting for the next musical item, and one would of course feel hard done by if the performance simply jumped from one to the next, as is shown in those ill-advised recordings where the spoken dialogue is omitted.

It takes a particularly wilful wit to alight on Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict as the perfect operatic nod to a Shakespeare anniversary. To walk past Verdi’s Otello, Falstaff and Macbeth, to pass over Purcell’s Fairy Queen, Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi and instead opt for this curiously and idiomatically French piece of musical flummery, in which Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing finds itself stripped of any sour notes and whipped up into a sugary dramatic froth, is bold indeed. If it weren’t for the revival of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, opening at Glyndebourne later this season, it might even look a bit like taking le piss.

Grey men in grey overcoats walking through grey architecture. If you had to pick an image to reflect the current mood, the prevailing fashion in opera productions, this would be it. We may have outgrown the overtly Nazi settings of a few years back, but stepping into their highly polished boots are a whole platoon of non specifically fascist, 20th century exilic fantasies — all brutality, brutalism and barbed wire. Glyndebourne’s Poliuto, the Royal Opera’s Guillaume Tell, Idomeneo and Nabucco, even English National Opera’s Force of Destiny, the list goes on, and now boasts a new member in David Bösch’s Il trovatore. At least Bösch isn’t going gentle into that all obliterating fascist night.

Comedy and tragedy sit close beside one another in Mozart’s operas. Whether it’s the grinning horror of the Così finale — lovers joined, perhaps for ever, to the wrong partners — or the violence and mental instability so barely contained in the flimsy comic fabric of La finta giardiniera, there’s a continuum of emotion that belies the easy binaries of opera buffa and opera seria. Two new productions explore the shifting light of the composer’s chiaroscuro world, letting sunshine into the near-tragedy of Idomeneo and glancing into the darker corners of Le nozze di Figaro.

Tchaikovsky knew what he thought of the title character of his Eugene Onegin. ‘I loved Tatyana, and was furiously indignant with Onegin who seemed to me a cold, heartless fop,’ he wrote to a friend; and directors, by and large, have been happy to leave it at that. And why not? Dishy but emotionally unavailable Regency dandies have been a growth area in recent years — blame it on Colin Firth, if you like — and Eugene Onegin is probably the standard repertoire opera you’re least likely to see subjected to a directorial updating, in the UK at any rate. Michael Boyd’s new production at Garsington certainly doesn’t update anything.